February 08, 2013

One needs to suffer in order to write, sing, paint or sculpt

My book begins with Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, and with Derrida’s
eulogy for Deleuze, a eulogy that proposes there is something secret, something
left unsaid, in Deleuze’s concept of immanence as it related to Artuad’s
theatre of cruelty…. I did not approach the hermetic Deleuze from this
perspective, but from a longer, less obvious path through a more archaic
alliance between philosophy and spiritual ordeal, one that animates the
stranger and more obscure moments in the history of post-Platonic speculation
in figures such as Iamblichus, Eriugena, Cusa, Bruno, and Pico. It was the
period of the Renaissance, in particular, that seemed to resonate in strange
and uncanny ways with what Deleuze was trying to do as he affirmed the work of
art, the process or activity of the art work, as some kind of necessary aspect
of thought itself.

The importance of an irreducibly enigmatic dimension of images, signs,
and symbols that one sees in someone like Bruno points to Deleuze’s own view of
signs and concepts as both objectively indeterminate yet necessarily
provocative for thought itself. Above all I was inspired by what I saw as the
connection between a series of pre-modern philosophers who explicitly connected
the possibility of knowledge, as such, to patterns and habits of
transformation. Hence my emphasis on the meta-pragmatic.

Anarchism, the argument runs, works well in small tribal communities
where everyone speaks to everyone else and knows everyone
else, but when collectives reach a particular size this sort of communist form
of relation can no longer function because there’s too much separation among
the elements (people) that compose the collective. We require a party or
a state to manage social relations because of limitations communicative
possibilities.

It’s never fun to be insulted, but it has always seemed to me that
grownups are supposed to keep their negative – and positive – feelings to
themselves. (On a more elevated level, the Bhagavad Gita says
that the self-possessed man or woman is untouched by the dualities of praise
and blame, etc.)

Though Artaud did not worship Krishna
in any clear sense, he would fall in the first category if he did. And he would
surely be fascinated by the fact that the word for “utterly distressed” in
Sanskrit “artah”, after the sandhi, is pronounced as “ARTO”!! One needs to
suffer, needs to be an arta, in order to write, sing, paint or sculpt in a
manner that makes many hearts resonate and many eyes moist. -Arindam
Chakrabarti (excerpt from a brochure on Artaud, 1997)

The phrase “Savitri Era” needs to be popularised for easy
identity “for all Sri Aurobindo and
Divine Mother followers” and Jitendra, through his blog, has extended a helping
hand. As for the socio-political matters, I am ploughing a lonely
furrow with much trepidation. [TNM55] 8:21 am At Savitri Era, however, we keep moving,
steadily, like the winning hare. [TNM55] 10:23 pmReading the works of The
Mother & Sri Aurobindo is a life long task and to discover their effect
upon oneself is a unique endeavour. Sharing of ideas, of course, do help in
identifying commonalities and inculcating a sense of solidarity and mutuality.
How to translate our life's journey into an adventure in yoga, however, is the
primary concern. [TNM55] 11:18 pm